Simple Win! Congratulations to the German National Team

And it’s there! A dream has come true. Germany have won their fourth World Cup after 1954, 1974 and 1990, thanks to a 1-0 victory over Argentina at the Maracanã.

National coach Joachim Löw and his team had already become a part of history with their 7-1 win over hosts Brazil in the semi-final. Now, the trophy has crowned their fantastic performances this summer.

Success can never be fully planned; good and bad fortune plays too big a role for that in football. But one can attempt to stem the influence of imponderables as much as possible, with help of good ideas. Every small detail had been thought through in Brazil by the German National Team (DFB), from the choice and architecture of the team base Campo Bahia, to picking the colours of Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro’s most popular club, for Germany’s away-shirt. And last but not least, the national team has also benefitted from innovative technology developed together with SAP.

This journey started last year when National team general manager Oliver Bierhoff conducted some “market research” inside the locker room. He found that the players were most happy communicating with each other via digital platforms. Since communication was one of the main concerns during the tournament planning stage, Bierhoff commissioned SAP to develop an app that could facilitate the exchange of information about the team’s schedule, as well as data about the opponents.

SAP Match Insights helped the German team improve performance

SAP developed an app called SAP Match Insights based on SAP HANA technology that synchronised the data from scouts with the video footage taken from the pitch to make it easy for coaches to identify key moments in the game. Bierhoff liked it so much that he asked SAP to have the solution ready for the World Cup in Brazil.

In only six weeks, SAP Match Insights was developed in a way that allowed coaches, staff and players to make use of the data by themselves. Players and coaches quickly took to working with SAP Match Insights. A touch screen was put up in the players’ lounge in the base camp. On top of that, the app was downloaded onto mobile devices.

By using SAP Match Insights and SAP HANA, the German National Team coaches simplified training to improve performance, which makes the ‘beautiful game’ even more beautiful to fans worldwide.

Bierhoff is already thinking about the next step after the win. “It’s my dream that we will one day have a fully connected performance centre that collects all the training data for all players and comes with small lab in which we can develop our own ideas,” he said in an interview with Computerwoche.